


Texas Never Whispers

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Band Fic, Drinking, Drug Use, M/M, Texas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 22:03:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10500345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Songwriting pair James Potter and Sirius Black are a skilled duo with mad charisma,the writer had expostulated,and their switching off guitar and drum duties builds a sense of camaraderie that put a smile on this writer’s face. But Marauders’ guitarist Remus Lupin (yes, I’ve been assured that is his real name) is the band’s most technically skilled musician — and their secret weapon.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [montparnasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/gifts).



The guitarist from the opening band was sitting out on the curb outside the venue smoking a blunt. The sun had gone down hours ago but it was still so hot and the landscape so eerily flat and hued reddish with a liquid-seeming dust that Sirius wondered as he often did in North Texas if they had stumbled through a portal into hell or someplace similar. He was trying to remember the last time he'd been in Lubbock. Then the guitarist from the opening band said, "Want a hit?" 

He was slender and tall and odd-looking and Sirius had enjoyed watching him play (adeptly but without showmanship) from the back of the emptyish room despite his own looming sense of horror and disaster. James was supposed to be counting the money they'd made selling merch but Sirius's guess was they would have to siphon gas on the way out of town. As such, he accepted the blunt when it was passed. The guitarist had rolled it in one of the pine-flavored Swisher Sweets. "Do you know where we could siphon gas," Sirius asked. 

The guitarist thought for a minute. He had propped his chin up in the palm of his hand and his elbow against his knee and his spine pressed tectonic buttons against the back of his white t-shirt. Here and there over his arms like strange birthmarks and through the tears worn in the knees of his jeans Sirius could see abstract, smudgy blue stick and poke tattoos. "There's a pool hall three parking lots over," he said finally. "People get drunk and leave their cars there overnight. Have you got tubes and everything?" 

"In the van." 

"We can go now," said the guitarist. He pressed the ember of the blunt out against the sidewalk. "Where's your bandmate." 

"Inside still trying to get your drummer's number." 

The guitarist smiled a little or something. A twisting and almost uncomfortable movement of his face. ”You'll never see him again," he said. "She'll destroy him." 

They got the gas can and pipes out of the van and walked through the night-dark strip malls toward the pool hall. Most of the storefronts were empty and the ones that weren't were pawn shops or Wal-Marts or they advertised going-out-of-business sales."Your set was really good," the guitarist was saying. It took Sirius a while to realize he was being spoken to because he was so stoned on account of the potency of the blunt. "It's just nobody comes out to gigs in Lubbock ever really." 

"Yeah," Sirius said. He was feeling put out because no one had come out to his and James's gigs in Dallas or Oklahoma City either. He decided he didn't need to tell the guitarist that. Nobody had really come out to their gigs since they had left Austin. James's parents had come to the show in Albuquerque and brought all their friends from the wild horse sanctuary they had founded, and though Sirius's whole family was in Houston, or at least they had been last he had spoken to them, only his brother had come out, straight from work and wearing a cowboy hat and a bolo tie. James kept reminding him this was their first ever tour and they had just self released a single EP which had under five hundred streams on Bandcamp. Sirius kept reminding him that they had dropped out of college and needed to eat. James's parents had given them a cooler full of fancy organic snacks they were trying to cleverly ration and otherwise they would drive the van around back of a supermarket and dig through the dumpsters. It wasn't edifying for Sirius who was after all the disgraced scion of severe Texas oil money but it was thrilling for James who was raised by hippies. As for the gas can and the piping they had borrowed it from friends in Austin and used it almost every day. They slept in the van and showered rarely and usually at campgrounds. Sirius's back ached and he hadn't been able to write songs in a few weeks and he felt too tired even to sleep. Though perhaps that was the weed, possibly the only luxury that had not been in short supply. 

Outside the pool hall he and the guitarist found a dry cleaner's van and he set about siphoning the gas while the guitarist, lighting the blunt again with a match from his pocket, stood watch. 

"Where did you learn to play guitar," said the guitarist. He was looking into the milky black windows of the pool hall smearing his reflection against the neon with a calm and stoned intent. 

"Internet. You?" 

"My foster father." He turned to Sirius with a look. "I can tell you learned from the internet."

"What's that supposed to mean."

"It just means I can tell. You're a serviceable guitar player."

"James is better."

"Not by much. He just has those sexy moves." 

Sirius was offended that his own moves, which he perceived to be sexy, weren't mentioned. 

“I like the switching-instruments thing you do,” Remus said. “It’s clever and right now it’s all that makes you special. You need a bass player and another guitar player. I can't guarantee more people would come out to your shows. But it sounds hollow now. I like your songs but they're half songs. They all sound like demos." 

"Did you listen to our album?"

"Yeah. We don't open for every single Austin band that comes through." 

"You just open for the bad ones?"

"Precisely." 

He passed the blunt carefully to Sirius who caught glimpse of their reflection in the pool hall window. The tattoo on the back of the guitarist's wrist was an uneven pockmarked circle and Sirius realized it was a full moon. Flanking it were others, pale and delicate: chevrons, hearts and spades, horns, abstract shapes, a bow and arrow inside his elbow. The dark mirror of the window blurred his eyes. He had missed a spot shaving at his jaw and the thin hairs were pale but the streetlight caught them and the airborne reddish dust. When Sirius and James drove out in the morning it would be fingerprinted all over the van and in their hair and under their nails and gritty in their teeth. And it would be with the guitarist for as long as he lived in Lubbock. 

"Do you want to play guitar," Sirius said, passing the blunt back. 

"What?" 

"Do you want to join the band and play guitar." 

The guitarist looked at him disbelieving for a moment with his narrow crooked brow high on his forehead and in the silence Sirius could hear the wind and the gas siphoning in the tube. Then he started laughing. Eventually they were obliged to gather everything together and run back across the parking lots to the venue because a party of inebriated frat brothers had come out of the pool hall looking for a fight. James was waiting by the van looking shell-shocked drinking a 40 of malt liquor out of a brown paper bag. He was nursing, he explained, his broken heart. On such medication and a disgusting gas station hot dog he had eaten half of (he had saved the rest for Sirius, but it made Sirius nauseous to look at) he had spent their entire cut from the door. 

\--

James and Sirius had been randomly assigned as roommates their freshman year at the University of Texas Austin. James was from Albuquerque; his father was an activist and painter from the Laguna Pueblo and his mother a scientist from Ohio who had worked at Los Alamos until she had had a vision and walked out of the lab and into the desert on a Monday afternoon. She had taught James to play blues guitar and his father had introduced him to indigenous drum music. As such James had already written a ton of songs he had recorded himself in Garageband on his hand-me-down laptop in his bedroom with his mom’s acoustic guitar and electronic drums played through the computer keypad. His lyrics sucked; they were mostly about girls at his high school who had broken his heart. This seemed to Sirius like it must have been a weekly occurrence based on the quantity of songs addressed to different girls’ names. Otherwise James’s music was pretty good; in fact, it was much better than the music Sirius had written in his own bedroom in hell a.k.a. the McMansion in the Green Acres development in Sugar Land, Texas. The only thing to be said for Sirius’s songs was that he had recorded them with an actual drum kit he had purchased and learned to play as terribly and loudly as possible just to upset his parents. 

They would go to class all day (James in the anthropology department, Sirius first in the business school he had been admitted to vis a vis his epic legacy and later after a tearful breakdown in his advisor’s office to the liberal arts college, where he studied philosophy) and then meet up at night in the music building where they signed up for a practice room and played music, switching off guitar and drums. They would go outside every hour or so to smoke pot and then go back in again. Usually they were there until around two in the morning, and they would walk back to their dorm together in the pitchy and humid Texas dark. 

In their sophomore year they moved together to a squalid ranch house off campus and bought a drum kit and an electric guitar and an amplifier and a single microphone. With this basic technology they recorded a debut EP which of course was not very good. Most of the songs were under two minutes in length. They were invited to play shows at frat houses and things which went reasonably because everyone was so drunk. Sometimes other students would play their songs on the college radio station and once in a while they would busk on the street when they needed money. 

In the spring of that year at the urging of friends they posted the record online and booked a tour through the Southwest. Shortly thereafter while extremely crossfaded they decided to drop out of UT and pursue music for as long as it remained interesting and they could stand each other. The rest was history. 

\--

Remus didn't join the band the night Sirius first asked. Probably he thought it was a joke as he considered or pretended to consider most flattering suggestions or concepts. So four months later in a fit of something or other (he and James had had a fight, because they had almost no money, and Sirius had refused to ask his parents for some) Sirius did a bunch of coke and drove through the night to Lubbock. In that time he and James had procured a bass player, Peter, because he had come to their every show to the point of following them around in his gross Nissan Ultima (carpeted with fast food refuse) until they had relented and allowed him to audition to join the band. At which point they had realized to their chagrin he was actually a great bass player. He was altogether a disgusting person to be around in many ways, but he listened to a lot of harsh noise. Which was what Sirius listened to on the way to Lubbock, because he had borrowed Peter’s car without really asking. He stopped on the way in this nothing town called Wingate to essentially shovel garbage out of the car and do more coke under a streetlight like a detective in a film noir. After that he bought a giant cup of burnt coffee and a Madonna cassette mysteriously available at the gas station counter in order to counter the harsh noise. Then he drove on again. 

Remus’s band at the time was called the Pack. Sirius had liked their page on Facebook and as such had seen the listing for the show which was at a backyard barbecue near Texas Tech. He got there early and tried to nap in the car parked a few blocks over but woke with a sunburn when a cop rapped on his window with a truncheon. So he went over to the house and parked down the block and sat on the hood of the car in the sunset vaping (trying to exhale the largest possible clouds) until he started to hear someone playing a rhythmic bass drum from the show house and then behind him someone said “Hey.” 

It was Remus. He was leaning against the car and he had new tattoos. In the interim he had attempted, terribly, to bleach his hair. Yet he appeared to be wearing the same outfit he had been wearing the night they had met. 

“Nice car,” he said. He was looking in the windows at the trash on the floor and the harsh noise tapes strewn over the front seat. 

“It’s my bassist’s.” 

“So you got a bass player.” 

“Yeah. He sucks. I mean he sucks as a person but he’s good at the bass.” 

“So does our bassist,” Remus said. “Did you come from Austin?” 

“Yeah.” 

Remus didn’t say anything to that. They walked to the show house and Sirius said, “So, it’s a barbecue?” 

“Yes. Don’t drink the punch.” 

“Why not?” 

“There’s acid in it at least. Are you driving home tonight?”

“I hope not. I’ve been up for — ” He looked at his phone. “Thirty-two hours.” 

“You can probably sleep at Dearborn’s,” Remus said. That was the bassist. Very much later Sirius would learn Dearborn was sort of like Remus’s ex. He also played in a lot of shitty North Texas metal bands. “We’re supposed to play at ten which means eleven. Can you stay awake?” 

“I napped for like twenty minutes in the car. And I have some coke in my wallet.” 

Remus cocked an eyebrow vaguely in his direction. At the show house they went together into the bathroom and snorted the rest of it. 

“Who lives here?” 

“Lils does. Our drummer. And some other people from this band Order of the Phoenix.” 

Sirius’s heart was beating really fast. Remus’s forehead and neck were bright with sweat in the pale light through the pulled-tight venetian shades. There were haircut scraps around the sink and toilet and the mirror was pointillist with toothpaste spatters. They went outside together into the backyard. “This is Sirius,” Remus was saying to some people. “I don't you if you remember. He’s in that band Marauders from Austin.” 

A hot dog was pressed into his hand. So was a red Solo cup full of punch he tried to surreptitiously empty under the picnic table. Across the scraped-bare lot sifting red dust through the drought-browning crabgrass Remus was talking to the bassist, Dearborn. His hands were in his back pockets and he shifted his weight back and forth restlessly squinting toward the sunset. His spine pressed up against his white shirt like imperfections of tree bark or Indian carvings and under the pale fabric Sirius thought he could see more of the delicate smudgy blue tattoos or he had just had too much coke and too little sleep and was hallucinating. 

He sat there for a while fiddling with his vape pen and eventually switched the cartridge out for the cannabis one. Remus came over and took a hit and so did the drummer, Lily, and she sat with him watching the opening bands judgmentally. She had clearly had some of the punch because occasionally she would sit up straighter and her eyes would grow about six sizes in the sunset and the firelight from the grill by the porch, then she would relax again. At last she said, “Tell your boyfriend to stop texting me.” 

“Why would he be texting you if he was my boyfriend?” 

She just looked at him like the answer was obvious. Sirius was hurt. He’d never had sexual feelings for James but he’d always presumed generally he was too much of a catch to be cheated on. 

“I’ll tell him,” Sirius said finally. “He won’t listen to me about it though.” 

The Pack played at 11:30 by which time Sirius’s wiredness had faded into a half-crazed nauseous fuzziness like having chugged a lot of coffee on an empty stomach. There were four of them which constituted in Sirius’s mind rather a pathetic pack, at least numerically. Certainly they were all ferocious in different ways. Because Remus was pretty stoned he moved a little more than he had last time. In time with the quick riffs and flourishes and feedback squalls he stepped back and forth in a graceful and dancerly kind of way and watched the bassist the whole time reproachfully. Meanwhile Lily hit the drums harder than Sirius had ever seen anyone hit drums. The singer paced and staggered and screamed a lot like Iggy Pop on Xanax. 

They were a really great band, Sirius thought, and it was a shame they would have to break up or find a new guitarist. He slept that night on the couch at Dearborn’s and woke up around noon when Remus brought him a cup of coffee. “Are you going to come with me this time,” Sirius said, half asleep; he had twenty unread text messages mostly from James which he didn’t dare to read. His head was slamming and in the harsh desert light through the shades Remus looked achingly hungover. “We’ve been writing new songs.” 

Remus sat on the coffee table and Sirius played him some of the demos off his phone while he braced himself and read the texts from James: 

_where'd u go_

_are you dead_

_you’re totally fucking dead lol_

_i can’t believe the last thing i said to u was that u had a persecution complex and loved ur own misery_

_I’m fucking sorry lol_

He had followed these texts with a string of ghost emojis and coffin emojis and Edward Munch’s “The Scream” emojis. Sirius texted him: _Alive. In Lubbock_. 

_lol_ , James responded. 

“These sound a lot better,” Remus said when the second demo started. 

_are you with my girl_ , James texted. _you bitch. lol_

_no with her guitarist_ , Sirius replied. 

James sent nine more “The Scream” emojis. 

_not sexually_

“Stop fucking texting,” Remus said. 

Sirius put the phone face-down on his stomach though it kept vibrating presumably with suggestive emojis and took his vape pen out from his jeans on the floor. There was hardly any liquid left in either cartridge. “Is there a vape shop around here?” he asked Remus. 

“Shut up and let me listen.” 

He’d heard the songs so many times they sounded like nothing or less. They’d been recorded hastily without many effects just so that Sirius and James could remember how they sounded. His own recorded voice felt like a dream-self or a past life sometimes. Remus was looking blankly past him out the window onto the blunt dust plain reflecting-refracting the sunlight and the heat. There was a strange twist in the corner of his eye and he passed one somewhat-tidying hand through his hair revealing the messy dye job and the dark roots. 

“What do you think?”

“I said I liked it,” Remus said. 

“But what do you think about — ” 

“Yes.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Yes.” 

Sirius got up and got dressed and washed his face in the sink and Remus got his guitar and amp from the front room and they brought them outside together and put them in the trunk of Peter’s car. Then Sirius drove Remus to a trailer park on the edge of town and helped him climb in through a back window in a strictly enforced silence intercut by the howling wind across the devastated, devastating plain. Remus came out the window again maybe ten minutes later with most of his earthly possessions in a patched black Jansport backpack silently running across the lot bent double like a pursued soldier. Then he directed Sirius to the vape shop downtown. As they drove back to Austin he found a mysterious and perhaps magical radio station outside of Sweetwater that played 10,000 Maniacs. 

\--

Together the four of them forewent cigarettes and all drugs for an entire month in order to afford studio time to record the demos. This abstinence made said recording sessions a special challenge, particularly because Sirius found the raw thread of his patience far too thin to deal with Peter for more than an hour at a time even on a good day. They came out of it with some bruised egos and a thirty-three-minute EP that sounded good. Remus’s guitar playing was sharp and caustic and electrifying despite the fact he’d learned the songs and written all his parts less than a week before the recording sessions. He had an abiding affection for squalling feedback but he managed to make it sound good. The songs were the best when everything locked into a rough and shambling groove, like krautrock on LSD instead of amphetamines, and Remus’s guitar sparked and shattered over the top of it alongside the vocals. James mixed his singing very low and Sirius mixed his very high. They argued about this for several hours while Remus and Peter single-handedly revamped the band’s entire web presence. 

Four of the songs on the EP were James’s and five were Sirius’s including the closer, which was the longest, and, everyone except James said, the best. James wanted to call it _Schrodinger’s Friends_ and everyone else thought this was ridiculous but couldn’t come up with a better title. So it stuck. They self-released it on the internet and sent it to the UT radio station. Remus went to Goodwill and bought cassette duplicators and blank tapes and dubbed it and he even made cover art he photocopied at the library with Sirius’s student ID card. He had a job on the internet as a copy editor or so he claimed and as such he worked from home and had free-ish time which Sirius found himself envying. Himself he had started trying to book a tour between shifts and on his breaks at work as a line cook at a bar essentially preparing fried food only. He went home and lay in his bed which smelled like canola oil and nursed his wounded pride and oil-spatter burns with weed and then made some stoned-sounding calls to punkhouse bros, college radio DJs, and underground label and zine craftspeople across the South and West. 

As a quartet they played some shows around campus, mostly with gear borrowed from friends, and in the frat houses and bars they were booed and/or pelted with beer cans vastly less than they had been as a two-piece. They would play all the songs from _Schrodinger’s Friends,_ and two less-embarrassing ones from the first EP, and a cover of Pavement’s “Texas Never Whispers.” Remus had suggested they cover it during the recording sessions, and immediately following James and Sirius had a three-day fight over who would sing. In the end Sirius wound up singing simply because he couldn’t play the drum part, so James had to. 

They had half the tour booked by March when the college radio station asked them to play a frat house show they were trying to pass off as a South by Southwest unofficial showcase. There were a few trendy bands from Brooklyn and L.A. playing toward the end of the night and an intimidating number of people had RSVP’d on Facebook before the lineup was even announced, so they said yes. Their set time was at ten PM and the booker, who was the station’s general manager, said the show would probably go til four in the morning. They loaded in at eight, by which time the house was already so packed they could hardly carry their gear through the crowd, and set off to find the keg. 

At 10:45 they played probably the best set they’d played to date to a basement of stoned frat boys, collegiate hipsters, and jaded music industry professionals, all of them royally fucking wasted. Because they were nervous they played every song too fast but it turned out some of them sounded better that way. By his pedalboard Remus had a Lone Star with a straw in it and a red Solo cup half full of gin, Sirius learned when he took a swig of it thinking it was water. On their last song they locked into this supple and elastic groove and everybody was dancing and Sirius felt outside time or reality, like it was just the four of them in the basement which smelled like weed and mold and sweat, and the sound was just from space; it just was. They had summoned it and they wrestled it now like in the Vision after the Sermon. He had been watching Remus’s fingers on his guitar to follow him on the tricky bits but then he locked into Remus's eyes instead and something about it was like a dance, or a trance; he felt like a snake charmer, or he felt like the snake, or he felt — impossibly, perfectly, like final consummation or like apotheosis — like the music itself. Then the sound guy went around turning off all their amps. 

After the set Sirius was obliged to negotiate with an unfortunate ex for fifteen minutes or so, drenched in sweat and craving nicotine in the quietest stairwell, before he could go outside and vape. Most of the annoyance of this circumstance stemmed from the fact that James and even Peter were spending these fifteen minutes in Sirius’s plain sight blatantly ignoring all requests to pack up their gear in favor of glad-handing sorority girls and influential journalists alike. Seething, he stumbled into the backyard at the precise moment Remus lunged with both hands open like a butterfly catcher for the throat of the sound guy who had turned off their amps. 

\--

The next morning he woke to the familiar sound of vomiting. He went to the bathroom and took the chair out from under the doorknob and went and sat on the edge of the tub and watched Remus puke. There was blood spiderwebbing out of his eyebrow and printed artfully against the tile floor and disgusting rag rugs where he’d moved in his sleep. 

“I’ve got a joint I think — ”

Remus shook his head. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“Do you remember what happened?” 

“No.” 

His voice was an acid-rough un-voice. “You picked a fight with the sound guy,” Sirius told him. “He was about twice the size of you.” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah. You landed like, a single blow.” 

Remus sighed. “Jesus,” he said. 

“I brought you home and you kept trying to pick a fight with me. Which is why I locked you in here.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Yeah. No hard feelings,” Sirius lied. 

He went out and sat on the porch with his guitar and noodled around a little and smoked the joint and about an hour later Remus came out, showered, pale, with a ginger ale from the fridge. “Sorry,” he said again. “It won’t happen again.” 

“Really?” 

Remus sat down on the stoop and cracked open the ginger ale with seemingly immense difficulty. He moved like his head weighed a thousand pounds. “I don’t know,” he said. 

\--

He realized there was a lot he didn’t know about Remus though they lived in the same tiny house and drove around Austin in the same pathetic van and played music together most days and nights. Remus was vegetarian and his favorite movie was _North By Northwest_ and he thought the best musician ever to live was Kate Bush. His foster father had taught him to play guitar. He didn’t like the sound of his own voice and he was very secretive about the music he recorded on his own in his room though James had asked if he wanted to teach any of the songs to the rest of the band and Sirius sometimes lay awake and listened to it. The guitar loops through the thin walls fragile as spun sugar. He couldn’t sleep, listening to it, and he couldn’t sleep even when Remus stopped playing, and he leaned out his window vaping into the moonlit midnight wondering if he was problematically obsessed. He decided it didn’t feel the same as being in lust or having a crush and moved on. But he still couldn’t sleep. 

He brought up to James that he had concerns. They were alone in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Sirius had closed at work and James had been out with his sometimes girlfriend; evidently they’d done a ton of coke based on James’s red-rimmed eyes and manic heel-bouncing. “What do you want to do about it,” James said. 

“What do you mean?” 

“If he has a drinking problem. What can we do about it?” 

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might — ”

“What he really needs is to go to therapy,” James said, ever the child of hippies. 

“He’s a freelance copy editor. Or so he claims. He doesn’t have health insurance.” 

“That also means we can’t take him to the hospital if he drinks himself sick. Keep that in mind I guess.” 

“Jesus.” 

“We wrote the whole album with him,” James reminded Sirius. “I don’t even know what it would sound like without him. Probably like fucking shit. He can’t _not_ come on tour.” 

“Tour drives people fucking crazy.” 

“Yes, I remember, it drove you so fucking crazy last time that you asked him, a random teenage drunk from Lubbock, to join the band. So maybe something else good will come of it.” 

This seemed an offensive essentialization of someone as evidently complex and interesting as Sirius expected Remus probably was beneath the layers of armor and secrecy and skillful deflections he had decided to dedicate himself to dismantling one way or another. But he didn’t exactly expect James to be on his level when it came to the psychological interpretation of others. This was a skill, he had learned, that one perfected when one trusted nobody because anybody could be the person one’s parents had sent to ship one off to military school or a mental institution. 

On the strength of the March show they had been written up on a music blog which had posted their tour dates. _Songwriting pair James Potter and Sirius Black are a skilled duo with mad charisma,_ the writer had expostulated, _and their switching off guitar and drum duties builds a sense of camaraderie that put a smile on this writer’s face. But Marauders’ guitarist Remus Lupin (yes, I’ve been assured that is his real name) is the band’s most technically skilled musician — and their secret weapon._ About this write-up Sirius and James alike had been horribly jealous but they hadn’t discussed it. Remus hadn’t mentioned it at all and would later claim he hadn’t even seen it. 

“I guess so,” said Sirius, looking at the microwave clock without really reading it. Obviously James was right. But he had never liked thinking he was a bad influence on anyone, though most of the decisions he had ever made confirmed he certainly was one, and rather unabashedly. 

\--

The tour commenced in June with a well-attended show on Austin’s east side. They went South first, to San Antonio and Corpus Christi, then to Houston, where Sirius got almost too drunk to play when it became clear his brother wasn’t going to show up, and he wondered if he was a hypocrite, and James rubbed his back and held his hair off his face while he puked in the back alleyway for a solid ten minutes before their set. They went to Dallas next, then Abilene, Midland, Marfa, and El Paso, which was where it happened again. 

Sirius went outside after the gig to vape, and though he had low-key expected it every night after they played to no avail he was this time vindicated in finding Remus out in the parking lot getting his left eye socket punched in by the bartender, whom he had allegedly told for no apparent reason to fuck himself. Sirius and two guys from the opening band broke up the fight and one of the bouncers came over to talk down the bartender and Sirius stood, heart slamming (he had had some coke in the bathroom earlier), between Remus and them, in case they changed their minds; he could hear Remus sucking pain-sharp breaths and smell his blood; he was bent double supporting himself with his bloody-knuckled hands propped on his knees. Then he called a cab and put Remus bodily in it and they went to the motel where they were staying so far on the edge of town it was functionally in New Mexico, or Chihuahua. He fought Remus up the stairs to the room with Remus’s arm around his shoulders and they crashed through the door and into the bathroom where Remus pretty much instantly puked mostly in the toilet, which was a nauseating powder-pink ceramic.

“Why do you do this to yourself,” Sirius said. He sat, exhausted, cross-legged on the floor against the wall. Somewhere dimly he realized this was pretty cruel and yet he felt he had to know. Remus leant his forehead against the back of the toilet seat. He was breathing hard through his nose like a frustrated animal. “Why,” Sirius said again. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Yes you do.” 

Remus spat in the toilet and then he sat leaning up against the side of the bathtub. His left eye was swollen nearly shut already and cloudy with blood and he looked haunted and far away. Like something burning miles distant on the desert sending smoke off into the night. Drawing the sucking howling wind unto itself and beset by curious animals. “I don’t know,” he said again, sharper this time. His voice was venomous but hoarse with acid. 

“Is it because of your foster parents? Or your real parents?” 

“Shut the fuck up,” Remus said. He pressed the heel of his hand gingerly against the splintering broken brow. 

“I saw the place where you grew up, remember? The trailer — ”

“I didn’t grow up there.” 

“No?” 

“No.” 

He swallowed. In the fight with the bartender he had looked so possessed and now he just looked tired. Like it had worn him like a glove or something and then thrown him aside. He wouldn’t look at Sirius so he watched the water dripping from the end of the bathtub faucet stain rust against the ceramic. “I’ve lived everywhere in this fucking state,” he said. “Texas eats my liver every night in my sleep.” 

“Who knew — your drunken poetry.” 

“Fuck off. Do you think I would say it if it wasn’t real. Texas is like — all of time is on this broken record player.” 

“That happens everywhere.” 

“Not like here. Believe me. It happens here the most. Nothing moves.” 

“Right. All this has happened before and will again.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“I mean generally.” 

“No you don’t. You mean just one thing and you don’t know anything about any of it.” 

“Because you won’t tell me. And I know something happened to you to make you like this.” 

“What happens to anyone to make them like this.” 

“Terrible things. I don’t know.” 

Remus sighed and thunked his head back against the stained ceramic tub. “Do you know why people do terrible things?” 

“You mean besides for money?” 

“Yes. Besides for money.” 

“I don’t know. Cause they’re sick or deranged. Or they’re like, cultists, I don’t know.” 

“That’s such a fucking cop-out,” Remus said. He was nearly shouting. “Those are the two biggest cop-outs. I’m sick of that shit. People do terrible things because they love power. And they think they need it. And they can’t get it through reasonable means so they have to take it and as such they take it from those it’s easiest to take it from. Like children. Like vulnerable children. That’s why.” 

“That’s why you do this to yourself?” 

“That’s why people do terrible things. But yes. You fuck.” 

\--

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” Sirius said in the morning. They were sitting on the terrace of the motel and Sirius was vaping but Remus was just staring out over the desert.

“Whatever,” Remus said. He had gotten up before Sirius and cleaned his face and knuckles. Most of the wounds were scabbing but the deeper ones he had pressed toilet paper against as though he had cut himself shaving. Sirius remembered they couldn’t take him to the hospital even if they wanted to because he had no health insurance.

“So you were a vulnerable child?” 

Remus looked at him for a minute and then he looked back out over the desert again. 

“Come on,” Sirius said. 

“Fuck you.” 

Sirius pouted and looked down at the pool. There was a fine translucent webbing of floating scum in the corners. 

“My dad died when I was four,” Remus said. “Overdose. He was a roughneck for Shell Oil and he got hurt on a rig.”

“What about your mom?” 

“What about _your_ mom?” 

Sirius was surprised but indeed a trade of information seemed only fair. “She took like three Valium a day and had her hair blown out straight twice a week,” he said. “She wanted to be one of those powerful Texas women and I think she had deluded herself that indeed she was.” 

“Why do you think it was a delusion.” 

“I don’t know. You could tell it was an act when you knew her. She was an anxious wreck most of the time about her Position in Society and she hated that she loved my father. Because he didn’t love her. But we’re supposed to be talking about you.” 

Remus scoffed a little. “You from Dallas?” 

“Houston.” 

“Houston. I’m from Port Arthur.” 

“Functionally Louisiana.” 

“Yes. Our house was on stilts.” 

“What about your mom?” 

“She gave it a shot til I was six or seven and the neighbors called CPS.” 

“Why did they do that?” 

Remus looked at him again with a livid and hungover incredulity exacerbated by the swollen bloody eye. “Why in hell should I fucking tell you any of this. Why do you want to know?” 

“I don’t know. When I watch you play I can tell — all your grief and rage. And when you drink I can tell in a different way. It’s like two different veils and you take off one or the other once in a while. I’m around you every minute of every day whether I like it or not. Why shouldn’t I know?” 

“When you watch me play.” 

“Yes. Your face.” 

He couldn’t say exactly what it was about it and he felt himself flush with a little embarrassment. Remus bent and pressed his forehead against the wrought iron bannister. Down on the road a car went by playing Muddy Waters loudly through the open windows. 

“You look like you’re fighting with yourself. Half of you wants to get it out and half of you wants to keep it in. It’s like in the middle of your self-exorcism you start regretting it. The girls love it, haven’t you seen them?” 

“Fuck you.” 

“They love thinking one of us is irrevocably damaged. It gives them fuel for whatever it is they do.” 

“Irrevocably damaged, huh?” 

“Yes. I am too but it’s less obvious.” 

“Well it’s obvious to me.” 

“Is it.” 

“Yes. It’s been obvious to me since minute fucking one. You’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted in your life except love. So you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be like.” 

“Hell of a conclusion to — ” 

“Please. For you to give me shit about drawing conclusions.” 

“Well if you tell me what happened to you I won’t have to.” 

Remus sighed. Sometimes it seemed the best way to cajole him into things was to offer him empirical reason even if said empirical reason was truly a la Sirius ie. mostly abstract and theoretical. 

“My mom had this boyfriend who was cooking meth,” Remus said. “I was in these group homes in Beaumont and Galveston. Then with foster families in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Midland, and then Lubbock. I was fourteen when I got there.” 

“And you lived in that trailer. And learned to play guitar.” 

“At first it was, like the best place I’d lived since I left my mom and then it wasn’t. So, I guess — well, it’s grief and rage. Like you say.” 

“What about pain.” 

“What about it?” 

“Don’t you have it?” 

“Like, physically?” 

“No. I guess, I don’t know.” 

“I don’t anymore. It’s like a hole. Why do you think I have all these tattoos.” 

“Like a hole.” 

“Yeah, do you remember what it felt like when you lost a tooth? When you were a kid? Like a soft and raw sort of numb-ish vacancy.” 

“That sounds horrible.” 

“It’s much better actually. I prefer the grief and rage. Someday I think it would be nice to just have grief.” 

“Rage is punk rock.” 

“But it’s exhausting. Aren’t you exhausted?” 

He was shocked, or something; offended, perhaps, by that. “I don’t really have that much rage,” he said. 

Remus turned his head away and laughed a rare and electric shaking-down laugh. Downstairs Sirius heard a door, and then James stepped out onto the grotesque pool deck in boxers with his cigarettes and a Gatorade. He looked up to Sirius and Remus on the terrace shielding bloodshot hungover eyes from the sun. “What’s so fucking funny,” he said. “And what happened to your face?” 

\--

They played in Tuscon and Phoenix and drove up through California — San Diego, L.A., Oakland, all the way inland in two overnights to Salt Lake City where there was still snow in the mountains. “We didn’t book anything in the Northwest?” Remus asked. It was two or three in the morning and he was driving and Sirius had volunteered, which he was now regretting, to ride shotgun to keep him up. Remus didn’t seem to need this, however, as he was talking so much and so quickly Sirius suspected he had done some coke in the bathroom after the gig and was ragingly jealous. They had been listening to shitty ‘90s rock on Spotify but then had driven out of cell signal and were obliged to play music off Remus’s phone on which he had mostly saved songs that sounded like something following the van in the night. He said most of the bands were from Texas and a lot of them he knew because the Pack had played with them in Lubbock but Sirius had never heard of them. He wondered, as he had before, if Remus knew altogether a different version of Texas than he did. If as an experience it were so mutable even among native sons. 

“I don’t know anybody up there,” Sirius said. The truth was he knew one person, a drummer in a grunge band in Olympia, with whom he had once had a “relationship” consisting almost entirely of nude photograph exchanges via text message. The drummer could have undeniably gotten them shows but Sirius hadn’t heard from him in two years or so and had begun to look back at the affair with uncertainty and regret and as such didn’t want to reach out or even revisit the vicinity for fear the drummer had made and circulated some kind of artsy zine full of pictures of his dick. “Maybe next time,” he told Remus. 

“I’ve always wanted to go.” 

“It’s wet and cold.” 

“Yeah. It sounds nice. The opposite of Texas.” 

He yawned. They were alone on the road and the headlights cast silken ghostly loops against the asphalt and the stone. They were heading South to catch up with Route 70 which they would take through the night and through the Rockies to Denver. In the backseat Sirius could hear Peter snoring. 

“You ever been to Colorado,” Remus said. 

“Just on our last tour. You?” 

“No. Before this I’d hardly been out of the state.” 

“Not even Oklahoma?” 

“No.” He laughed. “Why would I go to Oklahoma.” 

“I don’t know. Lubbock isn’t that far. It’s a weird place but actually Tulsa is pretty cool.” 

“Dearborn’s from there. Well he’s from Broken Arrow.” 

“Dearborn — ”

“The bassist in the Pack. You stayed at his house on that fateful eve.” 

“Have you heard from him at all since then?” 

“No. I think he’s pissed I left. We had some, uh, stupid sort of arrangement.” 

This was a shocking admission Sirius had not expected and wasn’t quite sure how to respond to. “I do kind of feel bad about breaking up your band,” he said. “And I guess your relationship.” 

“I mean it was hardly a relationship. And anyway Lily said they got Gid’s brother to play guitar. He’s kind of like a virtuoso savant and they could never convince him to join while I was a member.” 

“Why couldn’t they get him to join,” said Sirius, though this was royally not what he wanted to talk about. 

“I don’t know. He paid a lot of credence to his dreams and astrology and stuff. I think he did too much DMT or peyote or something.” 

“Plenty of people believe in their horoscopes who don’t love psychedelic drugs,” Sirius said. 

“Does that mean you?” 

“No. Obviously I love psychedelic drugs.” 

“Well what’s your sign?” 

“Oh my God. Scorpio.” 

“Ah,” was all Remus said. He was smiling a little and in the quietude Sirius heard the eerie ringing guitar from the stereo and the sound of the tires on asphalt and the wind around the van. Far ahead on the high switchbacks the vivid red sparks of trucks’ brakelights could almost be mistaken for alien spacecraft landing machinery. 

“You fuck,” Sirius said, “what’s that mean?” 

“It just means — interesting.” 

“Are you serious?” 

“No,” Remus said. There was a strange laugh in the back of his voice. “I have no idea, anything about it.” 

He found himself wondering idiotically when Remus’s birthday was. But instead he said, “How did you end up in that band to begin with?”

“It went really fast. I met Dearborn at this hardcore gig and then in the morning I was sitting in his living room playing his guitar. He said I should come by with him to meet some people, and those people were Lily and Fab and they asked me to join the band. Actually when all that happened I’d never played an electric guitar before. I was I think seventeen.” 

“They asked you to play in a punk band when you’d never played electric guitar before?” 

“Lily taught me a lot and then I watched YouTube videos. How did you end up in this band?” 

Sirius nearly groaned aloud at the deflection. “You know all that. James and I just had this _folie a deux_.” 

“That’s it?” 

“Yeah. We had to do something, like, an outlet for creative energy or whatnot, otherwise we would’ve killed each other.” He tried to bite his tongue on it but couldn’t help it. “Is that, like, you know, what it was like with you and Dearborn?” 

Remus shrugged. “No,” he said. “I would’ve liked him a lot more if it was like that.” 

They drove on. Just before they reached national forest land the dawn broke soft butter light over the mountains. The highway and the high shreds of snow and the thick pines (partly decimated here by assorted invasive beetles) were cast as if through a stained-glass window in a pale rosy gold. It was all so very lovely that Sirius wondered if he was tripping with exhaustion. “Want me to drive the rest of the way?” he asked. 

They pulled into a gas station and filled the tank and Sirius went in to get coffees and they switched places. With James and Peter asleep in the backseat he could almost forget intermittently they were even there. As though it were he and Remus alone on the road in some American ur-myth rocketing ever toward uncertain ends. They could get enough of a signal to put Spotify back on so Remus queued up some old blues music and then he fell asleep with his forehead against the window and his mouth just a little open. And Sirius so help him found himself thinking of relatively untoward subjects. Not for the first time. He told himself it was primarily to keep himself awake. They were an hour from Denver according to Google Maps and soonish James and Peter would be up and rested and begging for a trip to Denny’s or something. Alone time on tour was rare and Sirius found he cherished it. He didn’t remember the last time he had had enough privacy even to jerk off, and it was rapidly becoming apparent this probably contributed to his sexual frustration. 

It was probably normal to wonder what your bandmates were like in bed, he reasoned. Especially if you were kind of platonically obsessed with one of them and his Dickensian personal narrative and velvety wealth of Problems. Mystification and/or intrigue surrounding the particulars of someone’s sex didn’t necessarily indicate lust, Sirius reasoned. It was different and removed. For instance, he knew that Remus wasn’t the most trusting or forthcoming, and he was a good liar, and he often said he was game for things he really wasn’t just to avoid argument. Probably he was an undemanding lover most of the time unless you really knew him which Sirius suspected Dearborn hadn’t, because he suspected most people didn’t. He wondered if Remus preferred to top or bottom and couldn’t figure it out. He wondered about this as he drove past Vail and Copper Mountain and the turnout for Breckenridge and a wealth of old-timey silver mining towns revamped for tourists and illuminated picturesque and stunning in the dawn glow in the mountains. Dearborn had been physically bigger than Remus was, Sirius thought he remembered, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. And besides Remus was taller. He was taller than Sirius and almost as tall as James, who was six foot six. This also didn’t necessarily mean anything. 

He wondered about the exact parameters of desire and thought perhaps he should write a song about it but his guitar was in the trunk and besides he was fucking driving. Something was up with Remus’s phone, because it just kept playing the same two Howlin Wolf songs over and over. Wanting someone could take many forms, Sirius thought. After all this was most of what blues music was about anyway. For him sex was usually kind of an afterthought or secondary perk. He preferred the metrics of figuring someone out, the process of which often necessarily included figuring out their body. Usually when the figuring out was done he got bored. Maybe he liked Remus because it seemed there was so much about him to figure out perhaps it would take Sirius’s lifetime. 

\--

After a few hours of fitful sleep in the motel room in Denver they went and played the show. James and Peter were well-rested and ready to party but for Sirius loading in and shaking hands with the promoter and all the other assorted parameters felt like dragging himself over hot coals. He was sure for Remus it did too because he had gotten that reproachful glare he got sometimes, it seemed almost subconsciously, and he leveled it at James whenever possible. Most of the shows had been at least reasonably well-attended, at least enough their cut from the door allowed them to eat two reasonable meals a day and buy gas station snacks for the third, but this room was so small they had sold it out. After the set at the merch table a girl told Sirius she and her friends had driven from rural Wyoming, which was mystifying due to Sirius’s exhaustion and nearly brought him to tears. Then she asked if James was single. “It’s complicated,” Sirius told her. 

“I’m mostly gay anyway,” she said. “There’s just something about him.” 

This was also mystifying. Sirius wished her luck and gave her a t-shirt for free. After a while he went outside to find she and her friends by the van with James and Peter, who were in jovial high gear and certainly coked-up, and Remus, who looked like he might immediately pass out from exhaustion though one of the Wyoming girls was sitting very close to him and smiling a lot. 

Sirius felt a quick lightning flash of jealousy he tried to dissolve by considering even if Remus decided he wanted to sleep with that girl it would be purely physical. But that still made him jealous. “He drove through the night from Salt Lake City,” Sirius told her. Sometimes he realized even though his charming Texan accent his voice could be a little haughty. “He won’t be any fun.” 

“And you will be?” 

“No. I had to stay up to keep him from passing out and killing us all.” 

“Take a cab back to the motel or something and stop killing our vibe,” said James. 

They didn’t need telling twice. They went back to the motel and Remus put the TV on and Sirius got in the shower. Jerking off seemed like a bad idea especially because he was thinking of Remus and Remus’s mouth. Remus lying on the bed in the AC watching whatever shitty crime drama was on. He touched his own mouth just inside his lip and despite the heat of the shower a chill went through him. His heartbeat was making him dizzy. He turned the water off and dried his hair and put his boxers back on and looked at himself in the mirror and counted to ten. Then he went out into the room. 

Remus was sitting on the edge of the bed watching the TV blankly. Already he had folded down the hideous comforter and put on the oversize beige t-shirt he wore to bed when it wasn’t six hundred degrees. Possessed by some desirous and mischievous poltergeist or so it felt Sirius knelt on the floor before him and put his damp head in Remus’s lap. Arms around his waist. Remus stared over him at the TV, which was playing some dismal local news story about skeletons that had been accidentally discovered nearby by a construction team laying cables along the highway. “What are you doing,” he said finally. His bones rumbled and his voice was soft and apprehensive. 

“I don’t know.” His voice sounded not so much haughty anymore but a little lost. And fevered. “I think I want to suck you off.” 

“Oh my God,” said Remus. But he didn’t move. 

\--

Sirius did that eventually and other things. Not that night, because Remus was very rigid, so they rolled and rubbed against each other in the bed in their clothes half-listening to the news anchor interview the construction workers about the uncovered skeletons. They fucked for the first time two weeks later in a motel room in Fayetteville, Arkansas on the hottest night of the summer. The air conditioning was broken. The show they had played down the street that night had gone well despite the fact the PA had briefly fritzed out in the impossible heat. After he had somewhat recovered from sex Sirius went out and across the parking lot to the gas station for a 40 which they drank together lying side by side in the bed spread-eagled naked under the ceiling fan starving for the slightest breeze and unwilling to touch each other even in the slightest for all the heat was so oppressive it seemed to have a texture. In almost absurdist contrast to not an hour previous where he had been inside Remus and all around him, they were clutching at each other like the last survivors of some horrible accident, and their sweat was like a liquid membrane through which they moved desperately against one another, and he had thought, impossibly, for a single lucid and utterly terrifying second, this isn’t enough. 

\--

They lay in bed together late in these shitty rooms. His head was on Remus’s belly and he listened. His heart and his grist and acid moving and his breath which was slow and soft and ponderous and his hand was in Sirius’s hair scratching a little behind his ear. Remus's skin tasted like salt and sage. He wouldn’t swallow when he gave blowjobs which hurt Sirius’s pride abstractly. Sirius kissed all the tattoos and the little markings even when they were so smudged and faded with age he couldn’t tell what they had ever been. “Do you like those,” Remus murmured, one morning, soft with sleep. Dawn was strange in the window and against the smoke-rotten carpet. 

Sirius’s mouth was at the join of Remus’s hip and belly where sometime long ago he had tattooed _SP_. Sirius had wondered if it was an ex’s initials or perhaps something more sinister entirely and had laid awake beside Remus tortured and fascinated by it in equal percentages until he did some Wikipedia spelunking and discovered there was a neighborhood of Port Arthur called Sabine Pass. “Yes,” he said. He drug his mouth over the letters and along the curve of the bone and lower still seeking the heartbeat in the thick vein inside Remus’s thigh. He did like them and their strangeness and how they made Remus’s body seem like some ancient map or tablet on which dead languages had been transcribed. And he liked how they made it seem as though there were some places which were untouched — unspoiled. He hadn’t told Remus about any of this. 

“I don’t even remember,” Remus said, “what they all are, anymore.” 

Woozy with sleep or pleasure like this he would talk a little more if you did the right thing. He opened his bent-up knees a little wider; he would never ask for anything aloud but he made intimations with his body Sirius found electrifying yet often frustratingly abstract. 

“Why do you have so many,” Sirius asked, “if you can’t remember what they all are.” 

Remus met his eyes for a second. Tit for tat, they were saying. He kissed the link of Remus’s thigh and pelvis where the bright blue vein was and the straining cords of muscle. His cock was half-hard, blood-hot, and Sirius kissed just under the head of it, and Remus shocked a little. “I wanted to really feel like I lived in my body,” he said. “Like it was really mine.” 

“How do you do that.” 

“Well if you don’t feel at home in your house you paint it or something, right?” 

“So is it — do you feel better now?” 

Remus looked away and sighed a little as if exasperated. In vengeance or whatever Sirius ducked down again and nipped his ass. “Do you,” he said again. 

“I can’t — ” Remus shifted. “Sometimes I do.” 

“Sometimes.” 

“Yeah.” 

They had been fucking — he looked at the clock — six hours or so ago with the local news and the AC on loudly to cover the creaking of the bed. (It was unfortunately likely, Sirius thought, that the precise cadence of local newscasters’ nervous voices would get him hard for the rest of his life.) He pressed a closed-mouth and chaste sort of forgiving kiss against Remus’s hole and felt the whole wound-tight body tense further and then unspool — 

“What kinds of sometimes,” he said, sitting up. 

Remus’s face was flushed and bright and his cock fully hard now. “Sirius,” he said. 

“What?” 

“Come on.” 

“You come on. Just tell me.” 

“I’m not going to say what you want me to say. Your ego’s already grotesquely overinflated.” 

“I know something else that’s grotesquely over— ”

“Jesus Christ,” Remus said, but he was grinning, “fuck you.” 

“I’m trying.” 

“You got me out of Lubbock,” Remus said, “so I owe you my life. I owe you everything.” 

“You would’ve left eventually by yourself.” 

“I don’t know. Maybe. There was always a reason — there would always be some reason or another to stay,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.” 

“Alright.” 

“Is that good enough?” 

“I don’t know, is it?” 

“It would — it should be enough. It’s the truth.” 

\--

Last time he and James had gone on tour he hadn’t truly grasped that the cocktail of exhaustion, monotony, and mind-altering drugs made it feel as though one had stumbled upon whatever infernal recipe made it possible to repeat the same day over and over and over again in different rooms and on different roads. On their first tour, he reasoned, there had been just the two of them, and they had been thinking too hard about where their next meal was coming from to notice the precise machinations of time. He watched out the windows at the strange highways. Memphis — Nashville — Durham — Savannah — the heat was interminable and outside the van it seemed to simmer. Sometimes he understood they were almost home and otherwise (customarily when stoned) he feared they would never make it there. He did too much coke and slept in the bathtub and Remus woke him up when he turned the cold shower on. He fell asleep in the car and woke up twelve years later in an ecstasy of ash to the extraordinary guilt on their emaciated faces. He woke up again, terrified and disoriented, and they were in gridlock traffic behind a car fire outside Atlanta. They played the show. In the motel bed with Remus he wondered if this whole thing wasn’t a dream. Behind the venue the next night in Oxford, Mississippi, Sirius was vaping and James came over and asked, “Are you alright?” 

“Yes.” 

“What’s going on?” 

“What do you mean.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

He sighed. James took a joint out from the front pocket of his flannel. Inside Sirius could hear the opening band playing completely harmless garden-variety jangly guitar pop. This seemed like something else that proved time was circuitous. “Too many drugs and not enough sleep,” he said, even as he took the joint when James passed it. 

“You and Remus go back to the motel early all the time,” said James. He had cocked one thick eyebrow halfway up his forehead in, it appeared, gleeful anticipation of salacious information. 

“Whatever,” Sirius said. 

“Well don’t do anything stupid.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

James took the joint back rather forcefully from Sirius. His eyebrow hadn’t settled but now it looked less friendly. “Don’t be an asshole is what I mean.” 

Sirius was offended. “I’m not.” 

“You _would_ take it upon yourself to hinge the success of this whole fucking band on your dick,” said James venomously. “We weren’t very good before he joined if you haven’t noticed.” 

“Well it’s a good thing I asked him to join then isn’t it?” 

“This is — didn’t you break up with that one guy when his mom was diagnosed with cancer? I thought you didn’t like working hard for it.” 

“That was completely different and it had nothing to do with — ” 

“Whatever. This is fucked, Sirius, even for you. You’re not supposed to shit where you eat.” James pressed the ember of the joint out against the brick and put the rest of it back in his pocket. “You had better fix it,” he said. 

“What am I supposed to do?” 

“I don’t know. Fucking fix it.” 

“It’s not broken.” 

“But it will be,” James said, “ I know you.” 

He went inside slamming the heavy door behind him. Sirius kicked it once it’d closed and it made a hollow ringing sound echoing over the shitty music from inside. When he could hear the opening band had finished their set he went in and they set up and then they played a needle-sharp and cutting set, sweaty, loud, kind of terrible; it didn’t feel good to make all that sound, and it was better than a fistfight with James, but it was at once a kind of physical transmutation of just that. Remus kept looking between the two of them with this expression between anger and confusion. Peter, as ever, was clueless, but played everything gamely at almost double speed and stretched out all the grooves. “I think that was the best show we ever played,” he said after as they loaded up the van. 

Sirius agreed but wouldn’t admit to it. They drove in silence through the night to New Orleans. 

\--

It was weird to come home, especially because they drove overnight from Houston and arrived at 6:30am, by whose dulcet dawnlight it was unlikely any of them had ever seen the house. They’d let friends crash while they were away on tour and the still, musty interior smelled like weed and unwashed bodies. There was a shocking, intimidating mountain of dishes in the sink none of them had the emotional fortitude to even look at more than ten seconds, and as such they parted ways to their separate rooms without much speaking. Sirius lay down on his unmade bed still in all his clothes, including his shoes, and passed out within thirty seconds. He woke that afternoon at 4:45 when Remus came in with breakfast tacos wrapped in tinfoil and reminded him they needed to drive over to the east side and play the last show in five hours. 

“Jesus fuck,” said Sirius. He had been dreaming he was running impossibly for a train as it pulled out of the station and the back of his neck was clammy with sweat. It was also nine million degrees in the room because he’d fallen asleep before he could put the air conditioner on. “I can’t get up.” 

Remus put the breakfast tacos on the bedside table beside the ashes of countless joints and put the air conditioner on. Then he left again, but he came back in a half hour and said, “I mean it this time.” 

They stumbled forth from their dismal squalid bowers into the golden heat-bloody evening and had a beer apiece sitting on the back bumper of the van and cross-legged in the driveway nearly silent with exhaustion. Sirius’s tobacco cartridge was empty and there was just enough of the cannabis one left for them to each have a hit. He tried to talk James into bringing him by the vape shop on the way to the venue but James shut him down with a glare. So they drove to the east side. 

Sirius and James hadn’t really talked at all since a few days previous in Oxford. And since that talk Sirius couldn’t very well do anything alone with Remus, because James was scrutinizing, it seemed, his every move. Plus they had all been anxious to be home and as such had done a lot of driving through the night and sleeping through the day to such an extent that looking at the pale sky with light in it seemed almost wrong. Sirius’s head hurt. Getting back in the van even to drive twenty blocks felt like being marched to his own execution. After this he was going to sleep forever. At the venue they loaded in and Peter walked a block over to get coffees. This wasn’t enough, so James walked five blocks over to get coke which they all did together in the alleyway behind the venue. Then their friends started showing up and they were obliged to do some glad-handing which seemed what with the drugs and exhaustion like a kind of gilded fallacy Sirius was floating over in a hot-air balloon. They watched their friends’ bands and drank Bloody Marys at Remus’s suggestion. “It’s healthy,” he said. Sirius was high and mystified by the barest fact of his existence and didn’t question it. 

Then they played. Sirius thought it was good. He didn’t usually remember everything from their sets. This time he remembered almost nothing. The next day when he woke up with a screaming hangover he learned it had been sold out. There was a picture in the local newspaper which James cut out and sent to his parents. The thing Sirius did remember was after the show he was in the alley having a cigarette (he could never figure out where he had gotten the cigarette), and reality sort of faded back in with this raging Doppler hum out of the infinite, like cicadas or a helicopter overhead, sound out of space, incredible melodic violence, when Remus punched him in the face. 

It kind of glanced off Sirius’s cheekbone and didn’t hurt much because Remus was so drunk. Mostly it was startling. He made some noise that was like a melange of stupid and defensive words, and he tried to lower his center of gravity or whatever one was supposed to do in this circumstance, but then Remus leant against the fence, and then he sort of fell against it. “Everything’ll be different now,” Remus slurred. “It’s over.” 

Sirius daubed his face with back of his hand to find thankfully it wasn’t bleeding. “What’s over?”

“Tour’s over you fucking idiot.” 

“Yeah. It was like we were stuck in a malevolent time loop.” 

“Well it won’t be like that anymore. It won’t be like any of that anymore.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You vapelord fuck,” Remus said. His eyes sharpened like a knife or a rasp of stone. It was like he had realized he was too drunk to physically fight, so he had decided to resort to maximal violence of any other form. “I have eyes.” 

“What are you even talking — ”

“I’m not a fucking idiot is what I’m saying. I notice what you do. I notice your digging in my fucking bullshit life.” 

“I’m not,” Sirius started. But then he stopped. 

“I don’t know why I let — okay no, that’s a lie. I like you. I want you to like me. I like playing in your band and I like sleeping with you. I figure — whatever fucking damage you have I can put up with it. But I see you.” 

“You see me what?” 

“You’re going to get tired of me when I run out of things I can stand to tell you.” 

“That isn’t true.” 

“You’re such a fucking — terrible fucking liar. You only keep me around cause — it must give you this weird psychosexual jealousy to think how it could’ve been even worse if you weren’t born into bougie oil money.” 

“What does that even mean?” 

“You wish you had something really fucked in your life. Because it would make more sense why you are the way you are. And people would be more sympathetic — James would be more sympathetic. I would be more sympathetic.” 

“Those are some fucked conclusions.” 

“Well I don’t want to even fucking know what you’ve concluded about me.” 

It was true. He didn’t. Sirius was embarrassed thinking of it now. 

“Take it as a compliment,” Remus went on. “I’m almost willing to put up with most of it because you’re so good at fucking.” 

“Thank you, I guess.” 

“Fuck you. Jesus Christ.” 

“You said take it as a compliment!” 

“I mean generally. Fuck you. I’m sorry your parents were mean to you. Be grateful they didn’t sell pictures of you on the internet.” 

He didn’t dare say anything. In the stillness he could hear the laughter and the music from inside the bar and far away, distantly, the cicadas, as though there were some part of this neighborhood, of this entire city, that was silent… 

“I’m leaving,” Remus said, “I fucking quit. I fucking quit the band and I quit you and I quit everything.” 

Sirius’s gut twisted vengefully. “No you don’t.” 

“You can’t tell me what to do.” 

“You wouldn’t want to quit if you were sober.” 

“Remember you told me — this is like a fucking veil. This is really me and so this is what I really want.” 

“No it isn’t.” Remus got up clumsily like a newborn calf on wobbly legs. He had to brace himself against the fence. “Do it in the morning,” Sirius said. “Quit in the morning.” 

“You’re always going to give me some fucking excuse. Or some reason to stay.” 

“You’ll make it half a block before you wipe out and crack your head open and you don’t have health insurance.” 

This was perhaps the most salient of all possible arguments in this circumstance. Remus pressed his forehead against one of the fenceposts. His lips were pursed so tightly they were white. 

“Where are you going to go? Are you going back to Lubbock? You'll have to walk. Greyhound won’t start running til 6am.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“Sit back down. We’ll get a cab and tomorrow I’ll take you to the bus station.” 

Remus did. But he looked at Sirius apprehensively. His eyes kept slowly and drunkenly drifting to the left. Gingerly Sirius sat beside him as though he might bite. He thought Remus smelled like booze and fear. “You’re right about most of it,” he said, “I guess.” 

“You guess.” 

“Yeah. I know I’m a dick. And I’m sorry. I can just tell you — or I guess I can’t tell you how you make me feel. Like, I want to protect you, but also I’m scared of you. Does that make sense?” 

Remus shrugged. “Not really.” 

“I’ll stop. I’ll do whatever you want. I need you to stay in the band though. I’ll do anything to keep you from leaving. I mean — I’m fucking sorry about everything. I wanted to know why you were like — because I’ve never met anyone like you before. And you figured me out so quickly. So I figured it had to be something in common but it isn’t. Or it hardly is.” 

He touched his face where it was hot and realized he was crying. Remus was watching him unreadably. And yet he couldn’t stop talking. 

“I want you to want to tell me things. Just, it makes me feel — special, I guess. That you’ll talk to me. And you make me sound good — you make all of us sound good. You make all the songs real.” 

Remus was quiet for a minute except for his nervous cracking of his knuckles in his lap. “Don’t fucking cry,” he said at last. He lifted the gin-smelling hem of his shirt to Sirius’s face and smeared the saline liquid around. Then his face paled about four shades and he leant mercifully to his left and puked. 

\--

All four of them slept in for a couple days. Sirius went by the bar where he’d picked up line cooking shifts before the tour only to find they’d closed down and the building had been purchased by some kale smoothie company. Possibly because he was so exhausted and didn’t remember the last time he’d had what constituted a square meal he walked around the corner and sat on the curb and cried for a minute until some college girls came by to ask him, gingerly and from a six-foot radius, what was wrong. 

He thought about going to Remus’s room and asking him, where do we stand? But instead, apropos of almost nothing, he went and asked him, “You ever give someone else a tattoo?” 

Remus had his guitar in his lap and he’d paused the track he was recording in Ableton on his computer. But he nodded. “Just Lily,” he said. 

“Would you give me one?”

“I guess. Depends on what you want.” 

“I want ‘Texas Never Whispers.’” 

“The whole song?” 

“No, just the words.” 

“Okay.” 

“Okay?” 

“Yeah. Where?” 

He showed Remus the place high up on his arm. “Are you sure,” Remus said.

“Yeah.” 

“Alright.” 

Remus put away his guitar and his laptop, and Sirius sat down on the bed and looked around the room. Remus hadn’t decorated it much probably because he didn’t have much, or much money. The curtains were stained floral lace from Goodwill. There was a wreckage of cigarettes in the ashtray on the bedside table and an empty bottle of gin on the floor that Remus kicked under the bed, he probably thought surreptitiously. Sirius watched him rummage around in the drawer and find the little canvas bag where he kept everything. He burnt the end of a sewing needle with his lighter then wrapped the whole body of it up to the tip in pale pink thread. Then he poured a little night-liquid ink into the cap of a water bottle. His mouth was just a little open and his brow furrowed in concentration and Sirius wondered how many times he had done this. He had never made a point of counting all Remus’s tattoos. Most of them were terrible. He had never even really asked about them besides why they existed. So he did. “Which is your favorite?”

“What?” 

“Of yours. Which is your favorite?” 

He indicated the circle on the back of his wrist. “It was the first one I did. And I was incredibly wasted.” 

“How old were you?” 

“Fifteen I think.” 

“Why?” 

“I told you why.” 

“But why that?” 

“I don’t know. It was the full moon. Are you ready?” He nodded that he was. “Lay down,” Remus said. He folded Sirius’s arm across his chest and leant over him and Sirius felt his own heartbeat jolt, bright and sharp, a horse-kicked feeling. Remus’s clothes and his hair smelled like smoke and rain. It hardly hurt. Sirius just didn’t watch. 

“Alright?” 

“Yes, yes, yeah. Keep talking.” 

“No,” Remus said, but kind of gently, “you keep talking. Why this?” 

“I don’t know. It’s a pretty song.” 

“Yeah. They have lots of pretty songs though.” 

“I don’t know,” he said again. It was starting to hurt a little and he felt almost giddy with it and with his heart beating hard against the case of ribs and with Remus’s free hand at his shoulder gently holding him down. “Lots of reasons. One is, I like playing it with you all and that it was your idea that we play it and I think, when we played it on tour, it was the only time I didn’t feel like I was trapped in this, you know, spin cycle, or whatever, and two is, it’s true isn’t it, that Texas never whispers? I mean, you know this.” 

“Yeah, that’s why I said we should play it.” 

“I can hear it yelling all the time. We have that in common, me and Texas, yelling all the time, which I guess is why I could never leave. Even though I wanted to for the longest time.” 

“Why’d you want to leave?” 

“Don’t you know all this? My parents suck.” 

“Yeah but, you know, your parents aren’t the metaphysical psycho-landscape of this whole state…” 

“Whatever. Maybe they are, a little. You never wanted to leave here?” 

“I wanted to leave where I was at. But I — you know. There’s a part of Texas that’s untouched.” 

“You said it ate your liver every night in your sleep.” 

“Well, I was drunk. I don’t know, it’s cold other places and the Mexican food sucks.” 

“It does. It fucking sucks.” 

“I liked the places we went on tour but it wasn’t the same. It’s like, there’s a tether. Did you get that?” Sirius had and at first he didn’t want to admit it. But Remus gave him a look and he nodded. “That’s another way that it never whispers,” Remus said. “There’s nothing subtle. Everything has to be huge. You and I couldn’t just have had regular shitty childhoods. They had to be shitty Texas childhoods.” 

Sirius thought about that for a while. Then he said “What word are you on?” 

“I’m on the A in Texas. Why, does it hurt?” 

“Only a little,” Sirius lied. 

“We can take a break.” 

“I don’t need a break.” 

This also was a lie and it seemed Remus could tell because he stopped for a minute and sat up, spine cracking. But he said “Alright.” When he started again it felt like a cold little bite. Something about it was mildly erotic; Sirius could feel his breath. His own skin felt very thin and hyperconducive. “Keep talking,” Remus said. “Tell me about your family.” 

This was an act of vengeance in many ways, he realized distantly. “What about them?” 

“Just about them.” 

“I don’t know, it was doomed from the beginning. My dad’s father brought him up in the business. My mom’s from oil money too but — Gulf Coast. My dad’s business is in West Texas along I-20 between Odessa and Monahans. There isn’t much left in those fields now. Diminishing returns.” 

“What did they do about it.” 

“Pretended they were richer than they were. They were all about appearances which is why they got fed up with me. My brother owns the company now and he’s been selling the land off bit by bit for ranching mostly. But I haven’t seen or heard from him in a couple months.” 

“Your folks still around?” 

“I think. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know if they’re in Houston anymore.” 

“Would you ever want to reconnect with them?” 

“I don’t even want to go to their funerals.” 

“Fair enough,” Remus said. Then he paused. “You’re shaking a little.” 

“What?” 

He sat up again. “You’re shaking,” he said, “in your shoulder. I can feel it.” 

“Oh.” 

“Let’s go for a walk.” 

Sirius’s arm hurt and his chest, with a sort of heaviness, like he might cry. Remus got up and stretched his neck and shoulders and yawned and put his shoes on. On Sirius’s arm he had made it through _TEXAS NEV—_ and the letters were raised and blood-black and swollen all around and bruising. Something about it had a kind of primordial significance that made him shiver. “Don’t touch it,” Remus said. 

“I’m not going to.” 

“You looked like you were going to.” 

He got his vape pen off the bedside table and they went outside. The night was humid and tasted sweet and the street was quiet. They walked in the road because it was rarely trafficked and the sidewalk was overgrown with elm and palms and prickly pear. In the houses the lights were on in the living rooms where families gathered around the TV. In the soft blue-white wash of it. The light on the ceilings and the dew-wet yards and the street… 

“James is worried,” Sirius said. 

“About what?” 

“I don't know, about you.” 

“And you, you mean?” 

“I guess.” 

Remus kicked a stone into the gutter. “Do you think he should be?” 

“No.” 

“Alright,” said Remus, a little nervously, though he was trying to hide it. “That’s good.” 

“He thinks you’re going to quit because of me.” 

“Why would I do that.” 

“I don’t know. You said you were going to the other night.” 

“I was drunk.” 

“Yeah, but — ” 

“It’ll take something bigger than you to make me quit. This is the best band I’ll ever be in.” 

“Really?” 

“Yes.” 

“How do you know that?” 

“It’s bigger than me. It’s one of those unsubtle things. It’s in everything and I think about it all the time. Not just about — ” He passed his hand abstractly between himself and Sirius, indicating sex perhaps, or some special vulnerability. “It feels like all of us have one consciousness. Even Peter.” Normally Sirius would’ve laughed at this but for some reason he found it so sincere as to feel like a mild blow. “So I won’t leave,” Remus went on. “You can’t let me.” 

He had the feeling he might regret this. But he said, “Okay.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Okay.” 

They walked together around the block. The sky was clear and the bright wedge of moon was in it among the shadow of the trees. “Are you feeling better,” Remus said into the silence. 

“Yeah, I think so.” 

“It’s halfway done. Or almost.” 

He could feel already the rest of it would hurt less. The numbness was almost soothing. Together they went inside to finish it. 

**Author's Note:**

> this is my THIRD r/s story named after [a pavement song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WOIgI__968). the lovely [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse) inspired sirius's constant vaping and as such this fic is for her.


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